The prior distribution \(p_\alpha \)  for the ancestral vacuum pertains to the question of initial conditions. The question of the initial state in quantum cosmology
remains an open problem and has been the subject of active debate for decades. Well-motivated and well-studied proposals include the Hartle-Hawking state [1]}
and the tunneling wavefunction [2]}, [3]}. At this point, even the qualitative question of whether the initial state should preferentially have
high-entropy/low-energy or low-entropy/high-energy remains unanswered.
